So this guy made an unsolicited redesign of the NYTimes website. I happen to know a little bit Khoi Vinh, who was design director of that site, and who I have always found to be a very smart (and charming) guy.

The redesign was pretty but ultimately unconvincing and written with pretty inflamatory language. 

Khoi wrote a very smart and classy response. 

Here’s how I would summarize the problem: most unsolicited redesigns suffer from a lack of empathy. Given that empathy just may be the most important skill a designer can have, that sucks. 

In this case, there’s two kinds of empathy that are missing:

• Actual human empathy: the text makes the author come off as a dick. And I don’t even think the author is a dick. That’s the problem with the internet: when you write, it’s easy not to remember that there are actual human beings who you might be disparaging. 
• Organizational empathy: it seems to me that a fairly basic rule of design is that design is a series of tradeoffs. If you don’t like the current design of a popular website, two things are possible: one, the people designing the site couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if instructions were written on the heel; two, the people designing the site made decisions in light of a certain set of tradeoffs and before you can comment on those decisions you should at least make an effort to try to understand what those tradeoffs might be. Occam’s Razor would seem to indicate that the latter is most often the case. And designs are often produced by organizations which themselves suffer have to make decisions and tradeoffs.

It seems to me that the interesting and valuable part of a design is not starting from what you think it should be and building it that way. It seems to me that the interesting and valuable part is trying to look and understand at why things are the way there are, the always-complex interplay of factors at work, and only then trying to come up with a better solution.

Design without research is like me drinking a bottle of JD, eating a double Whopper and smoking a pack of cigarettes and then going off to run a marathon (also known in my household as Saturday morning). The results ain’t gonna be pretty.

Some of the things the guy writes are pure, unjustified sanctimonious axioms, like “News is not social media. If it is, it fails to be news.” (WTF?)

But, perhaps even worse, some of the things he writes just show an utter failure to actually try to understand just what it is he’s doing. So for example he blithely gets rid of the “most popular links” because “popularity has nothing to do with news”, which makes little sense, but more importantly, these links exist because people use them. They find them useful. 

Same thing with “video.” Video is not a category! Gone! How clever! Except that sometimes people are in the mood to read, and sometimes they’re in the mood to watch video. That link is useful to people. 

Now maybe those things are still worth taking out. There is always the danger of ending up with a camel—a horse designed by committee—because everyone wants to add one little thing which is maybe sorta useful to some people. But you should first try to understand why it’s there and show that you’ve addressed those concerns.

Some things are just so ignorant that one wants hit one’s keyboard with one’s forehead. So for example, the New York Times website is turned into a subscription-only site because news is valuable, dammit, not like that dirty opinion and social media trash.

Without getting into the merits of that axiom, or the fact that a hugely important transformation of the NYT’s business model has been decided in a couple sentences for spurious reasons, the designer then says, because news is subscription based, hey presto, no ads or only small ads! (Which dispenses him from the hard work of figuring out where the ads go in his pristine design.)

Except… Except that in the news business, subscriptions are used to make subscribers more valuable to advertisers because they have more data on them. (And this was true in the print era as much as the internet era. Don’t blame this one on Arianna or Google or whomever.) The reasoning is just false from A to Z. And anybody who knows the news business knows this.

Again, it’s not so much that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s wrong in such a way that it is obvious that the author did no research on the thing he blithely proposes utterly transforming.  

(And it utterly bypasses an actually interesting design problem, which is how to make advertising that is appealing and valuable to a certain audience. But that part is hard.)

Designers like saying that design isn’t about making things pretty, and they’re right. Design is about understanding the world and people and how things work so that things can be made more useful and beautiful for people. But that’s not what this proposed redesign is about. It’s about grinding axes and showing off.